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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Turning Stories into Stories by Lucy Felthouse

Me Want Food welcomes Lucy Felthouse!

Firstly, I want to say thank you to Leigh for having me on her blog – thanks!

So, turning stories into stories is the topic of this post. I'm a very nosey person—I admit it. I like to know what's going on, I ask people lots of questions and I eavesdrop on conversations. I also encourage people to tell me stories—true ones, though. Why? Because they often provide the best inspiration for turning into erotic stories.

My latest release, Ditched, is a good example of this. I have a friend who fairly recently left the British Army, and although he'd never tell me anything classified, despite how much I pestered him, he often gave me snippets about what life was like, what sort of things happened day to day, and so on. One particular story he told me was about when he and a fellow soldier were on exercise on Salisbury Plain. Somehow they screwed up timings and ended up waiting for their pick up way earlier than needed. Then the weather turned shitty, and they had to shelter in a ditch.

A fairly interesting tale all by itself, especially if you love hearing that kind of thing, like I do. But I took it and stored it in the back of my mind until I decided to write my first gay story. For some reason, that snippet surfaced and I turned the incident into something utterly different. The basis is the same, of course, but I added two fictional colleagues who happened to be bisexual and threw them into a heated situation which ended up turning into something even more heated ;)

So, there you have it. Turning a story into a story. I give people I talk to fair warning—anything you may say may be turned into an erotic story. I don't want any complaints ;)

*****
Private Damien Stone is living in a nightmare. He’s out on exercise on Salisbury Plain with Lance Corporal Michael Scott—who also happens to be a huge pain in the arse. He’s a teacher’s pet who seems to delight in bossing Stone around. But that’s not the real reason Stone appears to dislike him so much. It’s because Stone—who’s bisexual—is seriously attracted to his superior, but he can’t do anything about it, because Scott is straight. Or is he?

“I can assure you, Scott, that it fucking is,” responded his colleague, Private Damien Stone. He nudged the other man, pointed to a place on his own map, then raised his arm and indicated a rise in the ground in the near distance.

“See, that’s that long barrow, so we are in the right place.”

Looking at the barrow—one of the many on Salisbury Plain—then down at the map, and finally at his compass, Scott had to agree.

“So where the fuck are they, then?”

Stone had no answer for that one. He looked up into the lightening sky, which in the distance was being slowly tinged with pink, but saw no sign of their pick-up helicopter. Straining to hear even the faintest sound of rotor blades, Stone remained silent. Hearing nothing, he shrugged.

“Dunno. Perhaps we got the time wrong, or something?”

“I hope not, otherwise they’ve gone without us!”

“Nah. We’re early, if anything. The sun’s only just coming up.”

Sighing, Scott stuffed his map and compass into a pocket, and said, “Well, I guess we’d better find somewhere to shelter. I don’t like the look of that.”

The that he was talking about was an ominous-looking black cloud being buffeted in their direction by the wind, which was picking up rapidly.

“With you on that one.”

On an unspoken command, the two of them immediately split up and started to look around for somewhere they could keep out of the wind and imminent rain. It wasn’t long before Scott shouted out, and Stone immediately turned and headed in the direction of his colleague’s voice.

When Stone arrived, Scott had already removed his backpack and dropped it into the ditch he’d found and was striding down the slope to join it. Luckily, there’d been no rain over the past few days so the ground was dry. If the coming rainstorm ended up being heavy, it was entirely possible they’d get wet arses, but for now at least they’d be reasonably comfortable.

Following his colleague’s example, Stone shrugged off his pack. Turning, he saw that Scott was standing with his arms out, ready to catch it. Tossing it, he gave a curt nod of thanks before heading down into the ditch.

Once there, he saw that some scrub covered a couple of sizeable rocks, meaning that they would at least be able to sit down. It would have to rain pretty damn hard for the water level in the ditch to get as high as the top of the rocks, so they’d be all right until the chopper arrived.

Lucy is a graduate of the University of Derby, where she studied Creative Writing. During her first year, she was dared to write an erotic story - so she did. It went down a storm and she's never looked back. Lucy has had stories published by Cleis Press, Constable and Robinson, Decadent Publishing, Ellora's Cave, Evernight Publishing, House of Erotica, Ravenous Romance, Resplendence Publishing, Sweetmeats Press and Xcite Books. She is also the editor of Uniform Behaviour, Seducing the Myth, Smut by the Sea and Smut in the City. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9